Music and Tragedy

MUSIC AND TRAGEDY

Myth and music are the principal roots of drama. Myths always played an important role in human societies. They created a process of communication between people, in which some individuals shared with others their understanding of the world. That was achieved by offering a representation of the world and by giving it a plot, so that it would be interesting and familiar to the audience and not just a dry lesson. Music could play a similar role, communicating situations and emotions by sounds and harmony. In the western tradition, the first "tragedies" were myths which were danced and sung by a "chorus" at festivals in honour of Dionysus (God of Wine), in ancient Greece. The earliest presentations probably consisted of a chorus of men dancing in a ring, reciting or chanting some Greek myth while individu...